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Inspired partly by this article, Rikker at Thai 101 has posted a great article about how the Thais remember the months. I thought the Japanese had it easy, but the Thai way is much more elegant.
In Rikker’s words:
In Thai it’s extremely simple: the number of days is encoded directly into the names of the [...]

The other day I was thinking about the words bullshit and horseshit. Where I am from, these words are used almost interchangably in situations where you think a statement or assertion is false, ridiculous, a lie, etc. I thought it was interesting that we have two very similar words to use in the [...]

Do you know which months have 30 days and which ones have 31? I don’t. At least not off the top of my head. If I need to know how many days are in a month, and there isn’t a calendar around, I use the knuckle-counting method. It’s not as fast [...]

Chapter 5 of Fight Club is another scene from the testicular cancer support group. At the start of the scene Thomas, one of the members, is telling the group how his ex-wife had her first child (with her new husband). In English, we usually say that a woman “has” a baby and that [...]

I mentioned a few days ago that I finished my first Japanese manga, Doraemon. Normally when I read something in Japanese, I input some sentences into my SRS. I didn’t do this with Doraemon. I was 500+ cards behind in my SRS and I wasn’t ready for more. Well, now my [...]

For Japanese, I use Anki as my SRS. It’s a great piece of software for studying Japanese. Here are a few reasons why:

It guesses kanji (Chinese character) readings automatically. This saves me from having to manually type in readings.
It has a lot of cool graphs and stats you can use to analyse [...]

I finished my first Japanese comic (manga) last week. Most Japanese learners jump into manga pretty early, but I didn’t because comics aren’t that interesting to me. Everyone says they are good study aids though, so I finally gave in and bought the first book of Doraemon. To be honest, I wanted [...]

Rikker at Thai101 has published a fascinating post about Thailand’s first printing press. The owner published a newspaper called the Bangkok Recorder, and advertisements seemed to confuse some of the readers. Here’s an excerpt:
I, the owner of this newspaper, have heard that those who purchase the Bangkok Recorder wonder, “Why are so many [...]

Last chapter I talked about mumbled Japanese and how it is difficult to pick up with an untrained ear. This time I’m going to look at another sticking point for me: katakana loan words.
Katakana Loan Words
When Japanese borrows words from other languages, naturally it changes those words to fit the Japanese sound system. [...]

These days Pali isn’t often spoken. But it is chanted quite a bit. I imagine most readers haven’t heard what Pali sounds like, so here’s some Pali chanting for you to listen to. Below the video I’ve pasted the actual sutta so you can follow along (they chant it twice).

Karaniya Metta Sutta [...]